Abstract
Reviewed by: Cultural Imprints: War and Memory in the Samurai Age ed. by Elizabeth Oyler and Katherine Saltzman-Li Vyjayanthi Selinger Cultural Imprints: War and Memory in the Samurai Age. Edited by Elizabeth Oyler and Katherine Saltzman-Li. Cornell University Press, 2022. 270 pages. ISBN: 9781501761621 (hardcover; also available as e-book). The "samurai age" (in scare quotes, for it was no monolithic thing) lasted nearly seven hundred years, providing ample material for cultural and historiographic commentary on warrior power. Such sense-making, furthermore, was often retrospective. Authors, dramatists, and statesmen turned to episodes such as the Genpei War (1180–1185) or the Sengoku (Warring States) period (1467–1573) as pivots for new beginnings and deep archives of unresolved traumas. Cultural Imprints, edited by Elizabeth Oyler and Katherine Saltzman-Li, peers at these cultural touchstones through the variegated lens of multiple disciplines. The editors of the volume manage a seemingly impossible tension between the individual and the collective, between period-specific acts of recall and the accretion of a shared archive, between discipline-specific preoccupations and a common inheritance of trauma and dislocation. Leaning on the idea of "imprints," they arrange the essays thematically such that each inscription builds on the previous one while leaving its own separate trace. Collectively, these essays help us see remembrance as a multifarious enterprise, one concerned with inscribing a past but also with securing a future, activated in literary tropes and religious rituals, and enacted through textual, musical, and sartorial means. Though memory work involves looking backward, the first chapter in the volume—"Memento Mori: Mōri Warriors, Manase Physicians, and the New Medico-Cultural Nexus of the Late Sixteenth Century," by Andrew Goble—centers on prospective rather than retrospective concerns. Anxious to secure the Mōri family's biological survival in the volatile Sengoku period, patriarch Mōri Motonari (1497–1571) established contact with the physician Manase Dōsan (1507–1594) in 1562. This contact proved fortuitous for the family's political future, for Dōsan was skilled in using aesthetic networks of tea for political diplomacy. During the 1580s, Dōsan joined Motonari's grandson Mōri Terumoto (1553–1625) at tea ceremonies that helped smooth the alliance between the Mōri family and Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598). Dōsan also wrote texts on health maintenance for Mōri descendants, trained the family's physicians, and served as battlefield physician for Terumoto during the [End Page 91] latter's participation in Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea. Among the many medical and pharmacological manuals that Dōsan wrote for the Mōri, Goble singles out one, Unjin chawa (Tea Conversations While in Camp in Izumo), in which Dōsan boldly theorizes that both medicine and governance aim to heal. In other words, Dōsan argues for ethical rulership while metaphorically conceiving the polity as an ill or healthy body. Though Goble does not state it directly, this reviewer sensed that Dōsan tailored his political advice to appeal to the Mōri's growing identity as custodians of the therapeutic arts. As the author later explains, the Mōri saw the bequeathal of medical texts as their family legacy. As a result, the Mōri are remembered not only as fighting men but as intellectual leaders who spurred the development of medical knowledge. Pivoting from prospective lineal identity to retrospective familial imaginings, Marimi Tateno describes how an individual act of commemoration spawned a lasting cultural memory of Toyotomi Hideyoshi in "Hideyoshi and Okuni's Kabuki: Memories Preserved in a Screen Painting." Tateno analyzes the screen painting Okuni kabukizu (Okuni Performing Kabuki; between 1606 and 1608), which has often only been studied in the context of kabuki performance history, to reveal how it transforms the upstart warrior Hideyoshi into an aristocrat comfortably ensconced among the imperial family. Using sartorial clues, she identifies key figures such as Empress Dowager Shinjōtōmon-in (1553–1620) and Princess Ryūtō-in no Miya (1592–1600) seated in the viewing box with Hideyoshi and his wife Nene (1542/49–1624). Given that both Hideyoshi and Ryūtō-in no Miya had passed away before the probable date of the depicted performance, Tateno argues that the screen was...